what it comes down to
by urfriendlyneighborhoodpan
Summary: "You know that things have changed." Character study.
**A.N.** **: From Kei's perspective.**

* * *

It all comes down to this, and what it means to you. You cannot count on your own two hands the amount of times you have carved yourself in an image _unlike_ yourself, what'll sit light in the stomachs of others and will not come back to you later in a fit of questions you do not want to answer. Every now and again it is there with a forced smile and you have made this face before, and you will surely make it again. The bathroom mirror knows your face as you know the smudges on its, and you have lost whole hours schooling your expression into this—what it comes down to, and what it means to you.

This classroom smells like chemicals, sharp in your nostrils, and some girl a couple seats to your left is wearing a perfume a sickeningly sweet. You consider breathing through your mouth but the thought of someone hearing you forces you to cast that aside. Part of you just wants to go home, there's a show on later today and you'd planned to watch.

The topic strikes no real cord in you, but propriety demands you follow through.

And that truck, and the way your entire body seemed to scream all at once with agony, all that blood on the asphalt and the fire splitting right over your flesh, is perhaps the only real reason you have to drop this façade. Something is undeniably changed the second the fear washes from those eyes and turns to greed, the second everything so carefully built is toppled over before you. You do not aim for home, although part of you just wants to lay down for a minute. All that time wasted studying, you think, will have gone to waste if the media catches wind of this—and you know it will catch wind of this.

So you count these blessings, what they mean to you. Nothing will go to waste, you think, there are some things that cannot be unlearned.

Relying on others is all you've ever known, and Kai smells like gasoline and memories forgotten. There is some semblance of relief here, but your mind reels at this. The night is so dark and so full you feel a shiver down your spine; nothing here is what it will seem, and so those hands around your throat may as well be your own. You cannot predict everything that happens, but this you knew well. Relying on others is all you've known until this point, the second you render them motionless you know something has changed.

You know that things have changed.

Kai sleeps too deeply, it will certainly bite him back one day.

But perhaps his trusting you is worse, how easily you dropped him before; he should know by this point that history has the habit of repeating itself. And as all things go, you cannot deny it that.

This is the way it stands, you are no longer man.

You are quick to accept, adaptability is a virtue and you have always been a fast learner. When you wake bound tight head to toe, you know never to trust again.

.x.

You haven't thought of your sister, or your mother, or your life before this one a single time since you'd started tossing up your cards. There is something thrilling about chances taken but you are forever logical, forever caught up in your own calculations it gets hard to pick things apart without a breath in.

She had long hair, right?

Nakano asks you if you have dreams once, and it is the first time you realize you don't. The night passes in this way and it is all you know, you are asleep and then awake before you know it and when is the last time you had a dream? When is the last time things have gone your way? The sky is still blue and your stomach rumbles with hunger. And that has to mean you're still functioning how you should—perhaps if you bash your skull in it'll reset _something_.

Figuring out what parts of you are still the you before it all hit the fan becomes harder and harder. Your features are sharpening and sometimes you cannot recognize that face, or that mirror, or those hands so often steady now trembling.

She had long hair, right?

You don't necessarily tell anyone that doesn't already know about your family, or the life before, all the things you often forget. A gun feels more natural in your hands than a pencil and no part of you might have imagined that just months ago. There'd been a school you'd had in mind, and when you pull up pictures on the monitor they do not hold the same weight to you. Regardless of what happens here, and how it all ends, you will never go back to normalcy the way you'd known it then. Nothing has gone to waste, but the mind is a flimsy thing. You are forgetting things.

Your sister, right? The reason sometimes you can't pull apart the fabrications from the truth, why your mind spins with this fact, unrelentingly there. That presence hanging over you sometimes does not feel unfamiliar, and you don't think it ever has.

"There's a chance," he says, smoke clouding thick and irritating in the air. "It's been much longer than you think."

How utterly disappointing, the one thing that is supposed to follow your orders unprejudiced cannot even do that.

Oh, you remember this. Tall and winding, this tapering thing that stares impassively back.

It was there, too, right?

.x.

You have not met many others like you. That is your consequence, if you'd the choice you would have preferred thrice her and none of him. There is some level of envy here, that woman works with dexterity and she can't be too many years older than him. From the lines on her face, she may well be within a few months, and this is upsetting, too. Tosaki says something or another, but there's trauma, a tender spot not yet calloused. This is her weakness.

Thrice of her, empty slate.

Today you learn nothing goes to plan. The sun beats down on your back and you decide to resent your neglect, each pushup tears at the muscles in your arms and the boy beside you hardly breaks a sweat. So there's that, the girl has the skill, and this boy has the strength, and of course that puts you here. If the others could see that, maybe they'd stop pushing you so hard. As things stand, you grit your teeth too tight and the sweat dribbling over your temples burns your eyes.

Maybe you'll slit his throat, or her throat, or your throat—you've died enough times it won't hurt the same, but that's gotta be better than this. Whatever the case, there's a pattern here and one of you three must take longer regenerating and you're not sure who yet.

Reset, that night you breathe in quick and one of you has to die. But trauma, this tender spot has not yet calloused and you don't call it mercy, or empathy. Perhaps she has dreams where you don't, and perhaps she wishes she doesn't. You can find her easy but you don't call it empathy, the other boy snores from the room next to yours and the nighttime air feels cold on your skin. There are guards everywhere and they'll all only live once, in the shadows behind the building you discover the pressure in which to split an artery, the angle of the knife.

Reset.

.x.

It is hard to remember neither one of them has gone through what you have, that of the three you are the outlier. He has been successful in what you never had the chance to be, every time your face is on the news you resent his isn't, too. And she, she has some semblance of normalcy, some pattern to fall into you long for yourself. So between the three of you, you are the most damaged—you think, won't say to her face lest she show you the scars you have no interest in seeing—and between the three these limbs are less yours than you'd like to admit. No part of your body aside from your head are the same you started out with, and this counts for more than you'll ever say.

"This is," she says, with no shred of familiarity to hang between you, "all that I have."

Nobody says it, and you do not bother breaking the tension. There is a goal to be reached and once there you will drop them as you always have.

They must know at this point that history has the habit of repeating itself.

.x.

Nakano is no saving grace, and you do not rely on him. Most everything you say slips through his ears and you imagine splitting open his skull to check if there is a brain there at all. He talks easy and lightly and it's all a thin veneer, more flimsy than the spider webs you brush away once a week. There is a satisfaction in this, toppling what is so carefully built; discovering you are equally flawed. You do not count them friends but in all this facility they are the only ones that _know_ —

There it is. Nakano flips a blade in his hand too quick and it catches; Shimomura idly runs a fingertip through. Blood wells up ruby, stark against their skin.

Perhaps checking to see if it's still there, perhaps doubting it'll last forever, perhaps hoping this time it _won't_ —you do not pretend to understand, but you _know_.

.x.

It all comes down to this, and what it means to you—if it even means anything to you at all.

You do not play pretend anymore, there is no one here to impress, no one here to fool into thinking you're something you're not. Someone names you monster and you have to agree, you have long since realized you are no longer man. There are no masks here and you almost revel in this, spare little concern to your act and pull a face in the mirror when no one's around. You don't know it so well, those shadows or that prickle of hair at your chin.

You're still growing, and this just barely registers in your mind.

There are nights you remember this well, bundled up in your sheets with a fire starting up where it needs not be. It is less and less as the days and then weeks and then months go by, that come doomsday you almost forget what it feels like. You are wholly aware you are different, in more ways than the one, but the longer you dwell the less it sits right anymore and so you don't. There are better things to be doing.

The first dart strikes your chest sharp, pulls the air from your throat like you knew it would, and it all comes down to this.

What it means to you—if it holds any meaning at all.

.x.


End file.
